VOA常速英语:UN Climate Talks Begin in Doha

The United Nations Conference on Climate Change began Monday in Doha, Qatar. Delegates from nearly 200 countries hope to forge a new agreement on curbing industrial emissions that extends the Kyoto Protocol, the global climate change treaty due to expire this year.

Conference president, Sheikh Abdullah Bin Hama Al-Attiyah, reminded delegates in the cavernous Doha National Convention Center that the agenda for the two-week meeting is ambitious and challenging.

"We must achieve a second commitment period under the Kyoto protocol," he said. "We must achieve progress in what we undertook in Durban.

In Durban negotiators agreed to extend the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 climate change treaty that expires this year. The protocol identified increased atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases, such as industrial CO2 emissions, as a major factor in climate change, and it set emission- reduction goals for industrialized countries.

However, delegates exempted emerging economies like China, India and Brazil, which are now among the world’s largest emitters.

This year in Doha, climate experts hope negotiators can come up with a more equitable formula for curbing carbon emissions.

Jennifer Morgan directs the climate and energy program for World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank. She says striking a deal in Doha will depend heavily on the positions taken by the United States, which signed, but failed to ratify the Kyoto treaty. Morgan notes that President Barack Obama has pledged to pursue a new international climate agreement, though not one that threatens the U.S. economic recovery.

“I think that with the re-election of President Obama, there is a high expectation here from countries that they will hear a new voice from the U.S., that it will be more progressive and try and move things forward more aggressively than it has done in the past,” she said.